Wendy Sly nursed back for BUPA's Great North Run

It has been 20 years since Wendy Sly, the 1984 Olympic 3,000 metres silver
medallist, hung up her running spikes to concentrate on a business career,
but a chance encounter means she will be lining up for the first time among
an estimated 40,000 others in Sunday's BUPA Great North Run.

Back in business: Wendy Sly will brush off the spikes for Sunday's BUPA Great North RunPhoto: GETTY IMAGES

By Simon Hart

8:11PM BST 16 Sep 2009

In March, Sly found herself sitting next to an RAF nurse at a dinner held at the Aldershot Garrison in honour of the British cross-country squad, who were preparing there for the forthcoming World Championships in Jordan. Sly was the team manager.

After chatting about running, conversation turned to more personal matters and the women discovered that their fathers had died within five days of each other six months earlier. The nurse, Sam Tyler, who was preparing for a tour of duty in Afghanistan, had an idea.

Sly recalls: "Sam said to me, 'Why don't we do the Great North Run in memory of our fathers?' I agreed to do it and Sam then went up to get her Afghanistan leaving decanter.

"She gave me the decanter to keep and said, 'Whenever you look at the decanter, remember our promise that we are going to do the Great North Run.

"So back in March I made a commitment to do it and since then she and I have kept in touch.

"To be honest, I live in suburbia and I have a nice working life. She went out Afghanistan and she was still able to do the training, so I feel a bit humbled really."

Although Sly and Tyler have kept in contact through emails and phone calls, Sunday's half-marathon from Newcastle to South Shields will be the first time they have met since they came together as complete strangers and made their spur-of-the-moment pact.

Sly, who has kept fit over the years without having any desire to race again, says she definitely falls into the fun-runner category nowadays.

Sunday's outing will certainly be a far cry from Sly's most famous race, when her silver medal-winning performance in Los Angeles in 1984 was overshadowed by the dramatic incident when home favourite Mary Decker tripped over the barefoot Zola Budd, the South African-born athlete who was competing for Britain.

Sly was involved in a drama of more serious kind five years ago when she fought with a mugger outside a Surrey railway station and was sent crashing to the ground, hitting her head.

The incident resulted in Sly suffering a sub-cranial haematoma – the brain injury that killed actress Natasha Richardson – and she was rushed to hospital for life-saving surgery.

"I'm absolutely fine now," she says. "I was lucky that the injury was at the back of the head, which was very treatable." She will be running on Sunday for the Dame Kelly Holmes Legacy Trust, which helps give ex-athletes the tools to integrate themselves into the workplace when their sporting careers are over. She suspects it will be an emotional occasion.

"There have been times when I've thought to myself, 'Why am I doing this? I'm 50 in November and I've had a running career that was pretty successful so why am I doing this again?

"But I'm doing it because I made that commitment to Sam and, most importantly, to the memory of my dad."

The BUPA Great North Run will be screened live on BBC 1 on Sunday, Sept 20, from 9.30am to 1.30pm.